On Saturday night, Sparks and I and two of our friends packed picnic baskets and headed to the lovely outdoor Shakespeare festival where Sparks and I went a year ago. It’s so nice that there are already things we did a year ago and are doing again…
Between here and there is a wind farm, which consists of 250 gigantic modern windmills. We had drive past them on the way to a wedding the week before, and Sparks had gotten a tip about where to get up close and personal with them.
From the road you can see that they’re big.
From the little roads that lead to the base of each one, you can see that they’re huge.
And from the bottom of them, they are enormous monsters. Sparks got all Quixotic about it, I think. Standing at the bottom of one like this, as you look up a couple of hundred feet, the huge blades seem about to hit you as they swing around and make a deep, eerie “whoooosh… whooooosh… whooooosh” sound.
We hung around for a few minutes, then started talking about the movie Signs and decided it was high time we got out of the cornfield.
We settled down for our picnic on the green between the huge mock-Tudor house and the outdoor theater, at the Shakespeare festival.
We ate pesto shrimp, pita-chip panzanella from The Pioneer Woman Cooks, and cheap brie on French bread. We drank very good pinot grigio. Dessert was blueberries and lemon bars. I had the camera out, of course, as I always do.
I spotted four people in costume and took their picture, which got their attention. They approached us and wassailed us, briefly and enjoyably.
We aren’t supposed to take pictures of the set, actors, or play in progress, so I didn’t. The play was Richard III and it was everything we had hoped it would be. Richard got satisfactorily crazy, it was the winter of their discontent, theythoughts they saw a thousand fearful wracks, and a horse a horse–their kingdom for a horse.
Getting home after midnight is getting harder for me to do every year, and this year, I spent the day after feeling hung-over and exhausted. Still, it’s such a nice evening to have on a midsummer night. We will keep doing as long as we’re in the area and there is a Festival.
Thanks for prompting a little walk down my own memory lane. My husband and I have fond memories of the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, Utah as newlyweds. Before kids. Before a move halfway around the world to Germany. We picnicked under the giant trees in the area around the college campus, though our fare was rather simple: poorboy sandwiches, pears and cheese, and probably something sinful for dessert, though I can’t remember what it was.
Gotta love Shakespeare and picnics in the summer!